November 29, 2006

Fishers Snagged: Not Farmed, Then Not Organic

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times the market for organic foods continues to grow with sales reaching US$13.8 billion in 2005 compared with US$3.6 billion in 1997.

But there's not much 'organic seafood' about because of problems with definitions and also what fish eat.

Now I would have thought a wild Atlantic salmon would automatically qualify as organic. But according to the US Agriculture Department to be organic you need to be farmed: read the full story here including that: "Environmentalists rightly argue that many farm-raised fish live in cramped nets in conditions that can pollute the water, and that calling them organic is a perversion of the label. Those who catch and sell wild fish say that their products should be called organic and worry that if they are not, fish farmers will gain a huge leg up."

Posted by jennifer at 08:17 AM | Comments (31) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

A New Year's Resolution: No More Organic Food

Joe Fattorini writes in The (Glasgow)Herald about his new year's resolution which is to give up eating organic food:

It's self-indulgent, wasteful and frankly immoral. But you know how it is. I was swept along with the trend, and it felt good at the time. But I don't want to be a hypocrite. So I'm giving up organic food in 2006.

The incident that stiffened my resolve was a white rubber-banded wrist thrusting across me to grab organic apples. Here was someone who professed solidarity with the world's hungry. Yet they support a farming method that would starve over half the world.

The world was farmed entirely organically as recently as 1900. Since then the global population has increased over 3.5 times.

Unfortunately, the area cultivated for food has merely doubled. Even so, collectively we're better fed. In the past 50 years, the number who are starving has halved as the population has doubled. This almost miraculous turn of events is down to nitrogen fertilisers.
When it comes to basic needs such as food, the most important development of the last century has been the creation of nitrogen fertilisers. By replacing the nitrogen lost when a crop is harvested you can continue to plant the same plot of land each year without losing productivity. This means the same area of land produces anything up to double the quantity of food.

... So I know what you're thinking. "Yes, but I don't want to feed the world organically. Just my precious family." I'm sorry, but that's rather along the same lines as: "I know they guzzle petrol like there's no tomorrow and are far more likely to kill pedestrians. But my family is special. I really need a beast of an SUV with spinning alloy wheels and DVD players in the headrests."

At the very least, in a country like ours that produces excess food, organic farming robs land that might otherwise be used to promote bio-diversity. That's because organic fields need to be left fallow, growing leguminous crops or livestock whose faeces can be used to return nitrogen to the soil. Yes, you read that correctly. The inefficiencies of organic land use make it less environmentally friendly than conventional farming whose efficiencies mean we can return land to nature. But there's a more sinister perspective. In our lifetime we'll see global population top 10 billion. We're lucky it won't be more.

That alone means finding 35% more calories to feed the world. On decreasingly fertile land. But if we are self-indulgently to insist that we are so important that we should be fed organically, with its yields some 20% to 50% lower, that can only put an additional, unnecessary strain on feeding the planet. Every organic mouthful makes it more difficult to feed the most vulnerable. As the distinguished Indian plant biologist CS Prakash put it: "The only thing sustainable about organic farming in the developing world is that it sustains poverty and malnutrition."

Now if this all makes you feel a little gloomy, then I'm delighted to report that like all the best resolutions, giving up organic food makes you feel better almost immediately. I already feel freed from the hypocrisy. Organic food sales have doubled since 2000. According to Mintel the greatest growth is currently among "lower-income consumers" and those concerned about the health impact of pesticide use in conventional farming.

But wait a minute. Organic food - because it's so inefficient to produce - is considerably more expensive than conventionally farmed food. Yet it brings no health benefits and doesn't even taste better. If it did, then the Advertising Standards Authority wouldn't have upheld complaints against the Soil Association for describing organic as "healthier" than conventionally farmed food. Or as the Food Standards Agency put it in 2004: "Organic food is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from food produced conventionally."

... I can see a few hackles rising at the suggestion that organic food is a "middle-class indulgence". And you're right. It's more a brand, or perhaps a religion. "Organic" sits up there with McDonald's, Microsoft, Starbucks, Tesco, Shell and Lucky Strike as one of the great brands of the twentieth century.

Read the full article here: http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/53522.html
Published in the Glasgow Herald on 3rd January, 2006

Posted by jennifer at 09:57 AM | Comments (25)

December 02, 2005

Talking Up Chuck Benbrook To Talk Down GM

Imagine meeting a person who was once a top advisor to American Presidents Jimmy Carter, George Bush Senior and also Bill Clinton! He would have to have been rather special to have survived both sides of politics for that long as a top advisor.

According to Michael Thomson writing in The Land this week (pg 24) and also ABC Online, Dr Chuck Benbrook is that special - he was an advisor to those three US Presidents.

Dr Benbrook is currently touring Australia at the invitation of The GeneEthics Network with the tour sponsored in large part by the organic food industry. Organic Wholefoods, Organic Wholesalers, NASAA, Select Organic, Eden Seeds, Four Leaf, Lovely, Australian Certified Organic, Biological Farmers of Australia, Melrose Health Supplies, PureHarvest and The Diggers Club all feature as sponsors on the flyer advertising Benbrook's visits to all capital cities.

I heard Benbrook speak this morning in Brisbane. He had apparently just come from a meeting with senior Queensland government officials including Deputy Premier Anna Bligh.

The key message on the GeneEthics flyer is that GM Crops have been a failure in the US and "Australia can't afford to repeat America's costly GM mistakes!" At the meeting Benbrook claimed he wasn't anti-GM just against first generation GM crops particularly GM soy. He then preceeded to tell the audience the technology is risky.

They say when you are writing for a newspaper you should put the really important information in the first couple of paragraphs, given The Land piece and ABC Online claim Benbrook has been a top advisor to US Presidents in their opening paragraphs - well this is what gives the guy so much authority. This is why we should trust and believe him - this is why we should be suspicious of GM food crops. This is why someone is paying Benbrook to fly all over Australia and visit every state capital and Canberra for two weeks to tell us about GM.

What sort of positions would you expect a top advisor to three Presidents to have held? He would surely need to have been much more than an advisor to a congressman or Executive Director of the Board of Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences. Is it enough to have been Executive Director of a Subcommittee of a House Committee on Agriculture or Agriculture Staff Expert on the Council for Environmental Quality?

Benbrook has obviously worked within the Washington bureacracy, but I am not sure it is appropriate to claim "Top Advisor to three Presidents"?

The only really remarkable piece of information I could find out about Benbrook was that he was sacked from the Board on Agriculture at the National Academy of Science.

A piece in the journal Science (Vol 250, No. 4985, Nov. 30, 1990, pg 1202) refers to Chuck as Charles and explains:

"Charles Benbrook, a hard-charging critic of agribusiness who for 7 years has headed the Board of Agriculture at the National Academy of Sciences, is leaving his job. According to several sources, he was handed his walking papers by academy president Frank Press and given less than a month to clear out."

So what has Benbrook done since he left the Institute in 1990? According to the Pew Charitable Trust he runs Benbrook Consulting Services, a small consulting firm based in Sandpoint, Idaho.

I would rather discuss the pros and cons of GM food crops - the social, environmental and economic costs and benefits. But it seems our newspapers and organic industry prefer to talk up the credentials of a consultant from Idaho on the basis he is good at talking down GM.

.......................
The piece in Science can be downloaded by clicking here. It is about 270 kbs.

Posted by jennifer at 04:13 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

When in Drought, Grow Organic

My friend Dr David Tribe from Melbourne University has just started his own blog, click here. Congratulations David!

I was scrolling through his recent posts and there is a great paper on organic farming, download file. Well it provides good quantitative comparative data on yields, nitrogen inputs, and nitrogen leaching for conventional and organic systems for trials in Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

It is a pity they don't include the data from the Rodale Institute in the US.

Scott Kinnear, a Director of The Biological Farmers of Australia and Victorian Greens Candidate, and others, often quote the trials from the institute as evidence that that organic farming systems are superior to conventional systems and in particular that they give a higher yield.

Indeed Kinnear claims as much on page 9 of a recent speech titled How Organics and Slow Food will Feed The World:

"Organic farming in the US yields comparable or better than
conventional industrial farming, especially in times of drought".

The only example of this that I can find is a paper titled The performance of organic and conventional cropping systems in an extreme climate year, by Don Lotter, Rita Seidel, and Bill Liebhardt of the Rodale Insitute. They write:

In five out of six of the drought years during the 21 year experiment, corn yields were significantly higher in the organic treatments than those in the conventional treatment. The 1999 drought year being far more severe, results were more complex, and showed differences between the two organic crop systems. Rainfall during the 1999 crop season totaled only 41% of average. The critical month of July had only 15 mm of rain, about 17% of the average. Crop yields were reduced to less than 20% in corn and 60% in soybean. Most farmers would have abandoned such a dismal corn crop; however, this kind of stress can expose differences between crop management systems that mild stress conditions cannot.

So if you don't mind a really dismal yield, and if in drought, well you could go organic.

Otherwise, as the GMO Pundit, Dr Tribe says:

A review of farming performance in practice shows that for the same crop yield, organic farming requires more land than is needed with conventional farming with synthetic fertiliser.

Posted by jennifer at 10:11 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 03, 2005

Some Real Data on Organics Please

I have been repeatedly referred to the 'New Farm' website as a source of quality information on organic farming systems.

But I can't find any actual data at this site and my request for specific data seems to have just got me receiving their newsletter.

I note the site says:

One of the key features of the FST is its scale --small enough to follow rigorous scientific procedures for experimental design but large enough to be worked with regular equipment and to generate results readily applicable to normal farm operations. The level field of mostly shale-y, somewhat compacted silt loam is broken into eight blocks, or replications, with each block containing three plots, 60 ft wide by 300 ft long, and each plot divided lengthwise into three subplots. Eight replications of each of the three cropping systems are randomized across the blocks; while the subplots allow each rotation to be started simultaneously at three points, so the effects of annual weather variations are distributed across different phases of the cropping cycle. Datasets from the FST include weather records; energy and labor inputs; corn, soybean, wheat, and forage yields; weed, crop, and cover crop biomass figures; nutrient analyses of crops and cover crops; soil carbon and nitrogen levels; soil percolation rates; nitrate, phosphate, and pesticide leachate data; soil biodiversity surveys; and economic return evaluations.

Results from the FST have been reported in dozens of scientific papers over the years, and include this core finding: corn and soybean yields are the same across the three systems. Although corn yields were about a third lower in the organic systems during the first four years of the study, in subsequent years the organic systems actually outperformed the conventional system under droughty conditions.

Can someone give me a link or reference to a few of these scientific papers and/or how do I get to see the data from these trials?

Posted by jennifer at 08:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 26, 2005

Organic Food Crisis - Problems with Paper Trail

According to the Britian's Observer newspaper:

Britain's organic food revolution was facing its first serious test last night after an Observer investigation revealed disturbing levels of fraud within the industry.

Farmers, retailers and food inspectors have disclosed a catalogue of malpractice, including producers falsely passing off food as organic and retailers failing to gain accreditation from independent inspectors. The findings raise concerns that consumers paying high premiums for organic food are being ripped off.

... Figures from market research agency Mintel suggest three out of four households now buy some organic food and environmental groups said fraudulent activity within the industry must be stamped out for the sake of customers and legitimate farmers.

"It is not right consumers are paying over the odds because of fraudsters," said Vicki Hird, Friends of the Earth's food campaigner.

"These people are causing economic damage to other businesses who are playing by the rules," said Jenny Morris of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

There are fears an increasing amount of 'organic' food is coming in from overseas making it difficult to establish its provenance.

"There are no tests for proving food is organic," Morris said. "So it comes down to traceability, you have to follow a paper trail."

So it all comes down to a paper trail?

Posted by jennifer at 07:05 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

August 16, 2005

Organics Use Less Energy?

My recent writings on GM food crops, including in The Land newspaper last Thursday, have resulted in some emails suggesting that I am wrong and that organics, rather than GM, really are the answer.

I received an email with a link to a paper titled 'Organic farming stands the test of time' by David Suzuki published on 5th August:

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suzuki/Article_Archives/weekly08050501.asp

Suzuki suggests that organics use less energy than conventional systems. But then states organics require more labour to remove weeds.

I understand about 70 percent of the labour spent in traditional subsistence organic food production systems in Africa involve women hoeing for weeds. If this type of manual labour is not counted in the energy budget then the calculations are worth nothing.

Suzuki makes mention of the Rodale Institute Farming Systems which are organic.

Their website is here:
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/NFfield_trials/0903/FST.shtml .

I can't find any data that shows yields in organic versus conventional systems and relative to energy input.

Posted by jennifer at 07:22 PM | Comments (18)